Great Throughts Treasury

"All the prayers in the Scripture you will find to be reasoning with God, not a multitude of words heaped together." - Stephen Charnock

"The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service." - Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim

"Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser

"Such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing." - Thomas Paine

"To be fossilized is to be stagnant, unprogressive, dead, frozen into a solid. It is only liquid currents of thought that move men and the world." - Wendell Phillips

"An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department." - Walter Lippmann

"If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor." - W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden

"The word universe means the general assemblage of all nature, and it also means the heaven that is made up of the constellations and the courses of the stars." - Vitruvius, fully Marcus Vitruvius Pollio NULL

"Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth’s green see-saw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body’s obliteration in the Lap of the Lord." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita." - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"Words without experience are meaningless. [alternatively, Words without experience would have no meaning.]" - Vladimir Nabokov, fully Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

"A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"A woman who is loved always has success." - Vicki Baum, fully Hedwig "Vicki" Baum

"Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"We puzzle as to whether the universe is bounded or extends forever; whether, indeed, it may only be one universe among many. We speculate as to whether our universe began in a vast explosion, whether it pulsates between utter compression and wide diffusion, whether it is self-renewing and thus unchanged forever. And we are humble. But science teaches more than this. It continually reminds us that we are still ignorant and there is much to learn. Time and space are interconnected in strange ways; there is no absolute simultaneity. Within the atom occur phenomena concerning which visualization is futile, to which common sense, the guidance from our everyday experience, has no application, which yield to studies by equations that have no meaning except that they work. Mass and energy transform one into another, Gravitation, the solid rock on which Newton built, may be merely a property of the geometry of the cosmos. Life, as its details unfold before us, becomes ever more intricate, emphasizing more and more our wonder that its marvelous functioning could have been produced by chance and time. The human mind, merely in its chemical and physical aspects, takes on new inspiring attributes." - Vannevar Bush

"True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. - recast away the old is not of necessity to obtain the new. - To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"" - Tryon Edwards

"I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name." - William Morris

"As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. - Armies cannot protect it then; and walls that have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"The Buddha referred to married people as householders. He even gave clear instructions as to how one should be a good householder: Be nice to your spouse, be honest, be faithful, give alms to the poor, buy some insurance against fire and flood . . . I’m dead serious: The Buddha literally advised married couples to buy property insurance." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Just to avoid the pursuit of which is true, to avoid the inevitable pursuit of the fittest. Incapable of non-justice, without justice is tyrannical power. Justice is not necessarily opposed the strength, because there are always bad people. Justice of the non-power remains in the dock. So, we need to combine strength with justice, fair to do so strong, you need to have a justice of the fittestÂ… justice open to debate. Understood at first sight, the unquestioned power. For this reason, we could not give strength to justice, because power, go against justice, he said it was fair." - Erich Auerbach

"It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip." - Eugenio Montale